Daily Search Forum Recap: December 20, 2007

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Are All Googlers Cat Lovers?
So, it seems that only Googlers like their cats. WebmasterWorld members who are not Googlers do not. Matt Cutts loves his cat: AdWordsAdvisor plays devil's advocate in the "I hate cats" thread by stating that he/she (can someone please confirm?!) likes them: I don't hate cats. In fact, I like them a lot. Cats are cute in videos where they play with their tails (that video rocks, btw). But why do people hate cats? Some

Matt Cutts Delivers Promise to Google, but Does it Have Anything to Do with Performics?
The Smackdown blog by Michael Vandemar mentions that Matt Cutts had made some statements regarding the operations at Google with regards to how it approaches SEO and these suggested changes are finally a reality. First, you no longer need to admit guilt in order to submit a reinclusion request. And secondly, the SEO business needs not to require a money-back guarantee. The wording in the Google Help document has changed from: For your own safety,

Microsoft Live Search Fixes Problem with Google AdWords Ads
Yesterday, we reported findings that MSN was returning Google AdWords links in their natural search results. Well, Microsoft has responded to this issue on the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog, explaining that it was a complete accident and that it will be fixed in the upcoming days: The issue stems from the way Live Search handles content disallowed by the Robots.txt file. We regularly check the robots.txt file of a site to ensure that we

Google Translator Provides Translations in Gmail
Barry Welford at Cre8asite Forums stumbled upon a post by Rich Tehrani where Gmail has a feature that translates words on the fly for you, which is especially helpful if you're reading an email within Gmail and need to look up the words quickly. He explains: What you are doing is chatting to the bot that does Google translations. So for example if you want to translate from English to French, you add en2fr@bot.talk.google.com as

Google's Supplemental Index Announcement Drives More Confusion
The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results from the Google Webmaster Central blog announces, what Google calls, the "next major milestone" for Google's supplemental results. What is happening exactly? Google is implying that when you conduct a search in Google.com, Google will not just search their main index, but also search the "supplemental index" to return results from both indexes, dare I say it, equally. Or at least, that is how I understand it. Did webmasters

Spidering Music & Determining Snippets: How Does Google Search Do It All?
There are two scientific papers or patent that were written about by Bill Slawski and Gary Price, who else. Bill wrote about How does Google Pick Snippets for Your Pages to Show in Search Results? and Gary wrote about How Google Identifies, Detects & Understands Music Files. Both are very interesting concepts and reads. Let's start with Bill's snippets: Bill points to a new awarded Google patent named Methods and systems for generating textual information

Google Sends Out AdSense Payments Early in December
A WebmasterWorld thread named Bet on Google Paying Early in December says it all. Yes, as expected, Google has already started the "PIP" or payment in progress notifications to their AdSense publishers this month. Why was it so expected? Well, if Google's fiscal year goes by the calendar year and ends on December 31st, which I believe it does, then Google wants to spend spend spend, as much as they can before the 31st to

Google Gadgets Ads Being Spotted in UK
Many people are now spotted new Google AdSense ads. These ads are named Google Gadget Ads, yes, they are interactive ads, part of the AdSense program, which was launched on 9/19/2007 at http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/. As Darren Rowse explains, yes they are interactive ads, hence, "Gadget Ads." The first demonstrations of them were more video format like. Here is an example of one ad that has been popping up on UK sites: The first discovery of this